Inside, Outside, page 9
Well, this time we drove to Bay Ridge, spent a few hours there, and drove home, same as always. You have to “hollow out the canvas” in painting the flat surface, as Cezanne or somebody said; introduce the receding dimensions of reality to achieve a picture that matters. That will take a bit of doing with my uncle in Bay Ridge, since the dimensions of reality recede maybe to the fall of the Second Temple, but I’ll try.
Uncle Yail Mosessohn (Yail is Lithuanian Yiddish for Joel) repaired watches. He was the younger son of Reb Yisroel Dovid, of David’s Tower fame; therefore my mother’s uncle, and actually my great-uncle. But we all called him Uncle Yail. Yail should have been a rabbi, too, Mama says, for he was a superb Hebraist. But Yail went in for the Haskalah, the enlightenment movement which started in Russian Jewry about a hundred years after the rest of Europe got enlightened. The best Russian Jewish minds were steeped in the Talmud, you see, and the Jews were isolated in shtetls and ghettoes, so it took a while for those outside ideas to penetrate. Young Haskalists like Uncle Yail wanted to read the books of Darwin and Voltaire, and to write belles lettres in Hebrew and Yiddish—stories, essays, poems—instead of dwelling exclusively on the Talmud. But they were bucking a system many centuries old, bulwarked in oaken tradition that looked on the world wholly through the Talmudic prism. The rabbis’ idea of dangerous outside reading, fit only for a few mature and superior minds, was Aristotle. Plato was a subversive radical altogether to be shunned. As for Darwin, his name was spoken around the yeshivas only in whispers, like a cabalistic term for the Devil which could raise Old Nick smoking and grinning through the floorboards.
Well, as I say, Uncle Yail was a Haskalist. It’s a paradox, no doubt, that I have ended up a Talmud addict, whereas to my great-uncle the Talmud was a prison. Times change. I can certainly understand why the Haskalists had to break out and look beyond the old learning, but that fight is over. I’ve read all the Voltaire and Darwin I ever want to; and as an undergraduate of seventeen I had Plato and Aristotle coming out of my ears.
Now Yail’s brother Asher, who never left Minsk, was really a red-hot Haskalist. Asher read every unkosher book in Russian, Yiddish, or Hebrew that he could lay hands on. He never married. A warm pleasant man of iron principles, he lived at home with Reb Yisroel Dovid, who ate his heart out over his son’s profane reading. Asher showed no interest in his father’s masterwork, David’s Tower, or in the Talmud altogether. The Germans got Asher, as they did all my Minsk relatives, when they crashed into Russia in 1941. Mom loved Asher, whom she always called “the philosopher,” der filosofe. I wish I could have known him.
Uncle Yail rebelled and left home. Once in America, he was at loose ends, broke as a tramp, free as air, with nothing more to rebel against. And he was hungry. He landed in Bay Ridge, and there he came upon this remarkably ugly religious girl with a dowry of three hundred dollars. Yail married her, and with the three hundred set himself up in watch repairing. Anything but synagogue work or Hebrew teaching. He was a rebel, you see.
A rebel of sorts, that is. Yail’s house was kosher, as a matter of course. He kept the Sabbath and other rituals. Indeed, that was why he took up watch repairing, so as to be free on Saturday; but the work ruined his eyesight, and his scholarship went by the board. The woman he married was very fat, ill-favored, unsmiling, and by all odds the worst cook in the Mishpokha. Her green soup defies description.
There was something truly lugubrious about that Bay Ridge apartment. The visits were long, with long silences. Uncle Yail’s two daughters were sad bony girls who wouldn’t play, just sat around gloomily swinging their legs. They were decidedly odd, those girls. What became of the younger one I don’t know, but the bigger and bonier daughter, Evelyn, as she grew up developed a crush on Rudy Vallee. We heard a lot about that from Uncle Yail. Evelyn spent several years locked up in her room in that Bay Ridge flat, playing Rudy Vallee’s records and writing him letters. That was pretty rough on my uncle and aunt, hearing “The Maine Stein Song” and “The Vagabond Lover” crooned through the walls day and night, feeding Evelyn on trays left outside her door, and getting nothing from her except snarls, and batches of letters to mail to Rudy Vallee. Then someone started a Rudy Vallee fan club in Bay Ridge, and that was a deliverance for everyone. Evelyn got out of her room, out of that apartment. She became a stenographer, lived alone, had nothing to do with anybody except the Rudy Vallee club, and eventually moved to San Francisco and drifted from the family view. Why she went to San Francisco I can’t say. Possibly that was the national headquarters for Rudy Vallee fans.
I realize now that the pall over our Bay Ridge kin was compounded of poverty and unfulfillment. Watch repair was no more congenial to Uncle Yail than selling victrolas was to Uncle Yehuda. Mama rightly says Yail should have been a klay kaydesh, a holy vessel; a rabbi, a shammas, a cantor, a Hebrew school principal—something in that line.
Why wasn’t he? Well, I can’t hollow out that canvas. I don’t know why Yail persisted in watch repairing until his eyes went bad, and then took a job as a night watchman; or why, in his last years, he did become a klay kaydesh after all, a sexton in a Conservative temple in Los Angeles. He still remembered the whole Torah by heart, with perfect cantillation, from his boyhood, so he pretended to read it from the parchment holy scroll. Nobody knew the difference, and he got by for a while, but then he went stone-blind and that game was up. The Torah is supposed to be read, not recited from memory. By that time I had had some dealings with Hollywood, and I got him into a Hebrew home for the blind in Los Angeles.
The last time I visited him he lay stretched supine on his bed, sightless, wasted, inert. His face barely flickered when I took his hand and told him who I was. In our halting talk, I mentioned my Talmud study. The faded lips wrinkled in a pitiful grin, and he quoted feebly from its text: “The Torah seeks out its old lodgings.” Then he whispered something I didn’t hear. I bent over and asked him to repeat it.
“Speak to me in Hebrew,” he gasped.
It’s not my forte, but I did it. I forget what I said. He nodded, his face showing ghostly pleasure. He corrected a mistake I made in grammar, and he murmured, “They read me a newspaper story about you. You’re a famous lawyer.”
“Not all that famous, Uncle Yail.”
“Very successful. Full pockets.”
“Well, I have done all right.”
He caught his lower lip between his false teeth in a sudden short sob, turned his sightless face at me, and whispered, “Now do something for our Jewish people.”
This was right after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. I was planning to take my family there to see the Wall and Mount Sinai and so forth. It seemed to me that “our Jewish people” were doing pretty well for themselves. I didn’t reply. Later on, when I got so involved in the United Jewish Appeal, and a hundred times wished myself out of it, I would think of Uncle Yail’s last words to me. He spent his little strength running away from our Jewish people, and turned out to be running in place.
Such was the impact of the Haskalah on my Mishpokha. It cut short the long rabbinic line of Mosessohns at Reb Yisroel Dovid and his David’s Tower, of which ten or fifteen moldering copies may remain in the world. One of the great Haskalists said in his old age, “We wanted to escape from the Yeshiva and raise a generation of freethinkers. We raised a generation of ignoramuses.” That, the Haskalists perhaps could not foresee.
Still the Haskalah was inevitable. It was a hell of a cultural riptide, and my Bay Ridge uncle went down in the whirling waters. It was one thing for Pop to come to the Goldena Medina and busy himself making it here, ignoring all the intellectual problems of the transition. Uncle Yail was a thinker, a son of David’s Tower. He had to think about what was happening to our people. That took its toll, and he elected to go blind repairing watches.
***
The long ride back to the Bronx would end, the flivver would stop. Pop would reach into the back seat and shake us both awake. “We’re home.” Those are perhaps the sweetest words in human speech after “I love you”; at least so they would sound to me, after the greenish-white glare of Bay Ridge, and the long dark uneasy doze in the flivver. Greenish white? Yes, the street lamps in Brooklyn in those days burned a weird greenish white. I suppose they were gas-lit. I remember that cold glare in the night more than anything else about Bay Ridge, and now you know why I thought of it and dragged you there. Frankenthal.
15
Rosalind Katz and the Coo Coo Clan
How did I first become aware of the Coo Coo Clan? Again Frankenthal.
That’s how we pronounced it on Aldus Street: Coo Coo, two words. The “Coo Coo Clan” was no joke; I still feel faint fear, just writing out the name. Dimly I picture a vacant lot in the twilight, and Paul scaring the devil out of us as we sat around a fire roasting potatoes; warning us to eat the potatoes and beat it out of that darkening cold weed-choked lot before the Coo Coo Clan got us. Frankenthal was talking about the Ku Klux Klan, of course. He was a great one for snooping out harsh facts of the adult world, and relaying them to us in garbled form.
As Paul told it, the Coo Coo Clan was a huge gang of Krishts all over America who dressed up in long white sheets and pointy hoods, so they looked just like ghosts. Sometimes they rode around on horses. The main thing was, they hated Jews. The Coo Coo Clan killed, with horrible tortures, by the light of burning crosses, any unwary Jews they caught. This so shocked us Aldus Street kids that for once Frankenthal encountered skeptical hoots at his wise-guy disclosures. I myself was sure he must be lying, even though my blood turned to ice water at this nightmare vision of Jew-killing ghosts on horses. We jeered in a body that it was all bushwa, a Bronx gutter term equivalent to, though not meaning, bullshit.
“Okay,” said Paul Frankenthal, “you’ll see,” and he led a group of us to Southern Boulevard. “Look at that!” That was the poster of the coming attraction at Loew’s Boulevard, our biggest movie house: a huge luridly colored picture of the Coo Coo Clan, a whole band of them in the night, complete with pointy hoods, white sheets, horses, and flaming crosses. They lacked only the Jewish victims, for which they appeared to be out on the hunt. “Bushwa, hey?” sneered Paul Frankenthal. I don’t retain the name of the movie. I never saw it. I wouldn’t have dared to see it, even if I’d obtained the price of a Loew’s Boulevard admission. No monster movie could have been half so terrifying in prospect.
So Frankenthal’s fearsome revelation stood confirmed. The Coo Coo Clan existed. There was a movie about it! The Krishts could never again be mere objects of Paul Frankenthal’s dirty rhymes and jokes. They were the enemy; and being different from them, being Jewish, was no longer the most natural state in the world; it suddenly meant being an object of hate, a hunted prey, for absolutely no reason. Though the shock passed, my childhood remained shadowed by the Coo Coo Clan. In the presidential campaigns of 1924 and 1928 the Ku Klux Klan became an issue of sorts, so the newspapers helped me to understand what Paul Frankenthal had been alarming us with. In time I and my friends even managed to joke about the Klan, and about anti-Semitism. In a humor column I wrote in my college newspaper when Hitler first came to power, I thought of and printed a funny headline that I can never forget:
NAZIS BEAT JEWS, 21–19.
I was then a sophomore, you see, a liberated humanist of sixteen. I knew perfectly well that the noisy German politician with the mustache was a clown like Charlie Chaplin, and that there was really no such thing as a Coo Coo Clan.
Now, about Rosalind Katz, and after her the clambake. The shadow of the Coo Coo Clan fell athwart both.
***
What can I tell you about Rosalind that will bring her to life? The little bell of black hair that swung about her face? The pretty frocks she wore, her thin pink-white legs and arms, her bright hazel eyes, her remote cryptic smile? How do you describe falling in love with a girl years before puberty; years before there are the rounded breasts and the quivering thighs and the throbbing this and the hard that of the liberated housewives’ novels?
As for Frankenthal’s greenish-white loathsomeness, it had nothing to do with my feeling for Rosalind, nothing. I never even made the connection. I would no more have thought of lifting Rosalind’s dress and baring her behind than of stabbing her. She was perfection. She was almost holy. Rosalind Katz was the first female I was ever infatuated with. Everything adorable in a woman was there in Rosalind, in pristine purity; in that little black-haired girl in a white blouse and a plaid skirt, holding my hand on a May walk in the early 1920’s, when not only I but all the world was still innocent.
Class 1B-3, led by our big-nosed teacher, Mrs. Kraus, walked two by two, hand in hand, through vacant lots near Public School 48 on May Day. Mrs. Kraus lectured us about the wild flowers we passed, the butterflies, the grasshoppers, and the trees, and for a whole hour I held the hand of Rosalind Katz, after nearly a year of silently adoring her, of finding ways to be near her, to look at her, to catch her eye and exchange shy smiles. What I felt, when I was able to hold her hand for an hour, was fully as sweet an emotion as a grown man can feel for a woman. Perhaps it burned the more bright and clean without the smoky rich fuel of physical desire. That hand was alive and electric during the whole May walk. Nothing limp or passive about Rosalind’s hand, in that golden hour! And as it ended, she gave me her whispered consent to walk with me after school in the Dickeys estate.
The Dickeys estate was an anomaly, a big white farmhouse on a hilltop just a little way from Public School 48, set amid rolling greenery and woods. That whole part of the Bronx had once been large farms, but with the coming of the elevated trains, booming overhead along Westchester Avenue and Southern Boulevard, the South Bronx had gone all to hell in crisscrossing lines of tenements. Here and there abandoned farmhouses still stood, weatherbeaten wrecks stinking of excrement; “haunted houses,” which none of us, not even Paul Frankenthal, would enter except in bright daylight. But the Dickeys estate had survived in good condition as a Krisht orphanage; so we were told, and pupils of P.S. 48 were strictly forbidden to trespass. Mostly they didn’t, but I did. I loved the solitude and the greenery. Legend had it that you could find bullets from the Revolutionary War in the Dickeys estate, and that was my pretext for inviting Rosalind to come with me to the forbidden ground. We would hunt for bullets.
Well, it should have been the most delicious episode of my life. There I was, alone with Rosalind Katz at last, wandering in the woods in Maytime, holding her hand to help her climb rocks, sometimes even putting my arm around her, whether truly needed or not. She did not object. Now and then as we leaped and climbed on the wooded slopes, I would catch glimpses of her white drawers, dazzling as the sun. I’d swear they left shimmering pink after-images, those blinding little undergarments. Agile little devil, after a year and more of poised mysterious remoteness, Rosalind turned out to be!
Now, as I say, all this should have been absolute Paradise, and it was, it was. But there was a snake poisoning it all, and that was the reviving thought of the Coo Coo Clan. The visit to Loew’s Boulevard was fresh in my mind. This Krisht stronghold, on which I was trespassing for the first time since then, bore a new evil look. Was the estate a big Coo Coo ambush? Was that big “orphanage” up on the hill really full of slaughterers in white sheets and pointy hoods? Thoughts like that kept troubling my intoxicating idyll with Rosalind.
And not without reason! Through the woods came suddenly crashing three colossal Krishts. One of them roared at us, like a giant in a fairy tale, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE?” What made this worse, if anything could be worse, was that they were above us on a slope, these three men in rough clothes. They looked fully fifteen feet tall, glaring down at us.
“ARE YOU FROM PUBLIC SCHOOL FORTY-EIGHT?” bellowed another, as Rosalind and I clung to each other, tongue-tied and terrorized.
“Wha—wha—where’s that?” I managed to babble. Ghetto presence of mind, transmitted in the genes; me and the Porush, the quick deflecting question.
But poor Rosalind caved in. “Yes, we are,” said she in a sweet pleading little voice. “But we didn’t know we weren’t allowed. He brought me here.” A little pink finger darted unnecessarily at me. There was no one else around to finger.
“Come with us,” grated the third one, who had a terrible red face. As we walked up to the white building the three men talked about the infestation of the estate by P.S. 48 kids, the damage to the flower beds and trees, and the need to report us to our principal, a fat old bogeyman named Mr. Blume. To my first-grade intellect, being reported to Mr. Blume was the next thing to being electrocuted; yet even that was not as scary as being in the grip of these Krishts. I clung to the comfort that they hadn’t asked us yet if we were Jews, and that, for the moment at least, they weren’t wearing hoods and sheets.
In the white building we saw lots of children, so it was a sure-enough orphanage. And it was full of very strange cooking odors. What was cooking had never cooked in my home, or in the Frankenthal flat, or in any other Aldus Street apartment, or in any Mishpokha home. Krisht food. The three Krishts went into an office, leaving us shaking with fear on a bench in a corridor, smelling those alien odors, while the orphans came and went, giving us curious glances. Then out of the office catapulted a man dressed all in black, with a round white collar and no tie. Around his neck on a chain, a cross; not burning, but a cross. This was it!
“You’re not allowed to trespass on the Dickeys estate. You know that, don’t you?” he thundered.
